Little Nightmares III

Little Nightmares 3 nails the creepy atmosphere and unsettling visuals, but playing through it in co-op revealed some frustrating design choices that keep it from reaching the series' usual heights.

Introduction

My wife and I went through Little Nightmares 3 from start to finish in co-op, and I'm writing this review from that perspective specifically. The game immediately hits you with its signature dark, haunting atmosphere. Every environment drips with this oppressive mood that the series is known for, and visually it's stunning to look at.

Visuals and Readability

Here's where things get complicated. That visual richness actually works against the game sometimes. It became genuinely hard to tell what we could interact with versus what was just part of the scenery. Is that a platform we can jump to or just decoration? Can we hide under that or is it solid?

During chase sequences, this became a real problem. When you're running for your life and enter a new room, you have maybe a couple of seconds to figure out if you need to interact with something, find a hiding spot, or locate the exit. If you guess wrong, you're dead and back to the last checkpoint to try something different. Sometimes there wasn't even enough time to properly read the room, so we'd just go for whatever caught our eye first. The gorgeous but cluttered design turned these moments into trial and error frustration.

Camera, Depth, and the Z-Axis

The fixed side camera is fine on its own, but it creates serious depth perception issues in a game that requires z-axis movement and precision for jumps and interactions. There's this section in the middle with circular platforms that was its own little nightmare. We couldn't tell how far things actually were from us, so we just kept trying the same jumps at different angles until something finally worked. One mistake meant starting from the bottom again.

When you're dealing with those small hatches that need two people to open, both of us would struggle with the depth, especially during chases. It's like that USB thing where you can never get it right on the first try, except here it's ten times more frustrating.

Co-op Design

The puzzles themselves felt pretty samey throughout most of the game. It's a lot of basic environmental stuff without much creativity. That's why the finale surprised us so much. There's this mechanic involving a doll that I'll keep vague to avoid spoilers, but it finally introduced something genuinely interesting and unique. It's a shame that nothing like this showed up earlier, because the game really needed that creative spark.

Playing in co-op was fun mostly because it's a shared experience with someone you enjoy gaming with, but not because the co-op itself is particularly engaging. I think the big issue is that Little Nightmares 3 has optional co-op, meaning everything needs to work with an AI partner too. This really limited what the designers could do with puzzles.

They couldn't create ones that require actual communication or tight synchronization between players. The game sits in this awkward middle ground, and I wish it had either stayed pure solo like the first two games or gone full co-op with the kind of engaging, interactive design you see in It Takes Two.

Verdict

Little Nightmares 3 is fine if you want something to play through over a couple of sessions with a co-op buddy. The horror atmosphere, the creepy vibe, and the visual design definitely do the heavy lifting here. But from a gameplay perspective, it falls short of what I was hoping for, and at a $40 price point, that's a tough sell.